1. Technical Field
This invention relates to an electronic photograph forming apparatus and a method for controlling the apparatus. More specifically, the present invention relates to an electronic photograph forming apparatus which is capable of entirely removing waste toner without using a waste toner removing unit and a method for controlling the same.
2. Related Art
A printer is an image formation device which receives data and then forms an image corresponding to the data on a recordable medium such as a sheet of paper.
In a laser printer, print data can be received from external equipment such as a host computer or a personal computer in order to develop the print data into printable image data. The developed image data are stored in a print image buffer. Then a laser beam, corresponding to image data of one raster read out from the print image buffer, is emitted from a laser diode to perform a main scanning operation, thereby forming an electrostatic latent image on a photosensitive drum for every dot line. Thereafter, toner is attached to the electrostatic latent image on the photosensitive drum and then transferred onto a recordable medium such as a sheet of paper. The toner on the recordable medium is heated by a fixing heater of a fixing device to fix the toner on the recordable medium, thereby completing a print process. Laser printers are also referred to as electrophotographic printers. The aforementioned photosensitive drum can correspond to a photoconductive drum or an organic photoconductive drum.
I have found that toner can often remain on various drums of a laser printer, which will contaminate those various drums. This contamination requires that a waste-toner removing unit be installed in the laser printer to prevent or reduce the contamination.